THE

LIBERTARIAN

ENTERPRISE

Morning of Horror

First of all, expect never to learn the truth about what happened at
the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and elsewhere this morning of
September 11, 2001, any more than we did with regard to the murders
of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, at Ruby Ridge, Waco,
or Oklahoma City. Ambiguity and uncertainty serve far too many
political interests.

Another certainty is that, although I'm told 50,000 people worked in
the World Trade Center, more innocent individuals will die as a
result of what the Old Media are lovingly referring to as a
"lockdown" of Manhattan and other places, than any acts of terrorism
that may have occurred. The military has just said they'll shoot down
any plane they see flying. Only one civilian plane is in the air this
morning, Air Force One; that's as grim a warning of things to come as
I can think of.

"Collateral" deaths won't just happen as a consequence, say, of
somebody with a heart attack being unable to get to a hospital, but
whenever and wherever some dumb kid in an army uniform gets startled
by a car backfiring and starts spraying everybody and his pet poodle
with automatic rifle fire. Or to whomever the martial lawyers decide
it's safe to liquidate using this foul mess as a cover. Or, vastly
more ominously, to people in the not-so-distant future who decide
they must resist the police state that will inevitably result from
these events.

It's extremely difficult to think coherently about long term effects,
let alone to get it all down in writing, when you learn that, not
only were hijacked commercial aircraft used to commit these
unspeakably evil acts, but that 90 passengers died helplessly in the
first plane, and others yet unnumbered may have died in subsequent
attacks. Somebody has to think about it, though, or this
situation will be used to turn the Bill of Rights off forever.
Depending on the planning behind it, or who did the planning, it may
already be too late.

All airports have been shut down today, and I shudder to think about
what flying will be like from now on. The Clintons, Schumers, and
Waxmans will try to shut down the Internet, calling it a breeding
ground for terrorism. The Bushes and Cheneys will "reluctantly" go
along.

Rush Limbaugh will cheer them on.

What should those who value their freedom do? Every chance you have,
from this moment on, whether it's on talk radio, or on the letters to
the editor page, on the Internet while it's still possible, or in
communication with everyone you know -- it's time for even the most
apolitical to write to senators and congressmen -- emphasize two
points:

First, inform them that closing down the First or Second or any other
Amendment is not an appropriate response to what's happened, and that
any politician or bureaucrat in office who attempts to capitalize on
today's horrors is committing the same sort of blatantly criminal act
I've always insisted must be punished under Bill of Rights
enforcement.

Second, these things happen to nations with imperial ambitions. There
has never been a major act of terrorism I know of that hasn't
resulted from an act of government that violated somebody's rights.
The way to keep this sort of thing from happening again is to stop
those violations.

Hideously enough, my new novel The American Zone, scheduled to
be published next November by Tor Books, begins with an act very
similar to this one, carried out to force the creation of a strong
central government in the governmentless "North American Confederacy"
that figures in so many of my books. As anybody who knows my work can
safely predict, the evil scheme doesn't work and the villains are
defeated.

Life isn't as predictably pleasant as fiction. Happy endings are few
and far between. But it's important to act swiftly if we're to
preserve anything resembling the freedom that made this civilization
great.

Pass the word.

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